The Authorized Version or King James Version is one of the most famous English translations of the Bible, with an impact on the culture and language of the English people and Church far beyond the ability of scholarship to adequately assess. So strong is its influence there are still churches today that do not permit other translations to be used in their services.
Since the 4th Cent, the Bible used in the Western churches—if and when they were available at all in the local church—was the Latin translation known as the Vulgate. Latin, however, was not a vernacular language; ordinary men and women in the church did not understand it, and for too long the Church authorities had felt that it was not necessary for them to do so beyond what they were taught in their catechism and occasional sermons that they hear. One of the earliest Englishmen to espouse the necessity for the ordinary people to be able to feed their own souls, and be able to read the Bible in their mother-tongue was John Wycliffe. His influence was to lead to several attempts at a reliable English translation, including the one made by William Tyndale in the 16th Cent. When the Reformation finally began to take root in England, it was too heavily mired in the personal problems of King Henry VIII's many marriages and his near-neurotic need for a male heir to the throne, and he left the English Church neither here nor there at the end of his reign, when he was succeeded by his ten-year old son, Edward VI. Edward's short six-year reign as a minor left little imprint on the country, except as it strengthened the power of the evangelicals in the affairs of the nation. The attempt to restore England to the Catholic Church by his successor, Queen Mary I, brought chaos and blood-shed to the country. Having experienced the horror of the religious excesses of his step-sister, Queen Elizabeth (r.1658-1603) decided to take a middle-of-the-road approach with regards to the Church (what became known as the Elizabethan Settlement), which left many unhappy and very few satisfied.
When Elizabeth died without an heir, the English throne fell to King James VI of Scotland who became King James I of England (his maternal great grandmother was Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII who had married King James IV of the Scottish house of Stuart). The Stuarts were ineffective rulers and their century and a half rule of England were marked by some of the most tumultuous times in English history (including Charles I who drove the nation into a disastrous civil war that ended in his beheading, and James II who threw his royal seal into the Thames as he fled the country). However, as the first Scottish king over the English, James I was keen to impress his new subjects. With all the complaints coming in, especially from the Puritans, James thought he could make an attempt at resolving the unhappiness by calling a conference at his palace in Hampton Court. The Hampton Court Conference accomplished little; it did, however, agree on the need for a new translation of the Bible into English, a decision that would reshape the English language and culture in ways they never would have imagined. A committee of fifty-four revisers were soon gathered and the translation begun. Published in 1611, it became known as the Authorised Version (AV), since its publication was authorized by the king, or, as in the USA, the King James Bible (KJV), after the king who authorized it.
Hampton Court, where the decision was made for the Authorized Version of the Bible
The translators of the KJV did not start from scratch, and took into accounts the many versions already available then; using the Bishops' Bible (1568) as their basis, these other versions included notably Coverdale (1535), Thomas Matthew (1537), the Great Bible (1539), and the Geneva Bible (1560). They kept "felicitious phrases and apt expressions, from whatever sources, which had stood the test of public usage. It owed most, especially in the New Testament, to Tyndale." Not every scholar was satisfied with it when it was first published. One eminent scholar, Dr Hugh Broughton, thought it so badly done he declared that he would "rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches." And by 1755, John Wesley found the KJV so wanting he had published a new translation of the New Testament. It also had to complete with the Geneva Bible in popular use. In the end it prevailed and "entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples." The fact that, for the next two and half centuries, no new English translation was felt necessary is proof the quality of the KJV. It was admired for its "simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy turns of expression . . . the music of its cadence, and the felicities of its rhythm."
The KJV served many generations well. Its impact on English culture and language was immense. But the world has marched on since 1611; ways of speaking have changed, and biblical scholarship had made startling new discoveries in methods and sources of far better qualities than those available to the makers of the KJV. By 1870 Its many weaknesses (and all translations have them) became so glaring that the Church of England was ready to call for a revision, and beginning in 1881, the English Revised Version was published. Half a century later a revision of the RV was called, and the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the New Testament was published in 1946. Despite these changes, the KJV is held in such high esteem that it is still deemed in some Christian circles as the only translation fit for use in worship and study (what has since been labelled "KJV-Onlyism"). But is the KJV the best and the most accurate translation available?
The question is, in fact, multi-layered. It depends on what is meant by 'best'? There is, I suggest, an objective way to decide on this question, what I call the "pie-test." The test of a pie is not in the colour of the crust or the form of the dish on which it is presented. It is in the eating. The sole purpose of any translation is whether how well it conveys the meaning of a passage from one language into another. Any translation that does not convey quickly (transparently) and accurately what the original passage says in the new language is not a good translation. It does not matter that the translation exactly follows the grammatical, word-order, etc, of the original; if a foreign reader does not understand what is said, the translation might as well remain un-translated. How well then does the KJV do with a pie-test? Take this random passage taken from the KJV, for example:
Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?
Deut 4:34, KJV
Do you understand what Deut 4:34 is saying? If you do not, then this translation is no good at all, for, no matter what the translator—or a KJV-Onlyist preacher—may claim about its faithfulness to the Hebrew original, it does not do the work that a translation is intended to do, i.e., enable you to understand what the original text says. Now compare this with the renditions in the RSV and the NIV:
Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?
Deut 4:34, RSV
Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by miraculous signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?
Deut 4:34, NIV
Take another example, this time from Isaiah:
Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.
Isa 9:1, KJV
Again, if you do not understand what is being said, the KJV is no good to you at all. Now read this in one of the newer translations:
Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan.
Isa 9:1, RSV
But there will be no gloom for her that was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
Isa 9:1, NIV
I am promoting neither the RSV nor the NIV, but is it not clear that the KJV does not enable us to understand what the original Hebrew texts say? It has failed the pie-test. The English language itself has moved on. Its grammar and syntax have evolved. The meanings of words have changed. Extremely few ordinary persons, if stopped in the streets in a typical English village, will give you the correct answer if asked to tell the difference between thee, thou, thy, and thine. If even native English-speakers now have difficulty handling the language of the KJV, how unkind—wicked even—it must be for us to insist that our flock should use it as the authoritative version. There is no edification in it. The KJV has served its purpose as a good translation in the past; in the modern context, it fails as a good translation, and fails it miserably. That it should so fail is not surprising; it was never made to serve for eternity—not translation can. That it served so admirably for two and a half centuries before a revision was thought necessary is already proof of its immense value. We must honour it and not make it do what it cannot now do. If any of its original translators could speak to us now, they would tell us the same thing. It is time leave it behind us.
Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton, NJ, 2010.
Gordan Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version. Oxford, 2010.
D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids: OH, 1979.
David Crystal, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford, 2010.
David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven/London: 2003.
Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible. Manchester, 1982.
Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880. Stanford, Calif., 1999.
Hannibal Hamlin and Norman J. Jones, eds., The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences. Cambridge, 2010.
Alistair McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible. New York: Doubleday, 2011.
Nathan O. Hatch and Mark Noll, eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History. Oxford/New York, 1982.
Helen Moore and Julian Reid, eds., Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2012.
Adam Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. London, 2003. Also published in the USA as God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York, 2003.
David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge, 2005.
Orlaith O'Sullivan, ed., The Bible as Book: The Reformation. London, 2000.
Olga S. Opfell, The King James Bible Translators. Jefferson, NC, 1982.
William W. Combs, "The Preface to the KJV and the KJV Only Position," Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1.2 (Fall 1996): 253-267.
William W. Combs, "Errors in the King James Version?" Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 4 (Fall 1999): 151-164.
Jeffrey P. Straub, "Fundamentalism and the King James Version: How a Venerable English Translation Became a Litmus Test for Orthodoxy," Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 16 (Fall 2011): 41-64.
Low Chai Hok ©Alberith, 2018.